Utah in July

—guest post by Owen

I'm spending the month of July at a giant once-every-ten-years conference in Salt Lake City, my first time back in the United States since moving to the Netherlands almost two years ago.  There have been experiences in every quadrant of the pleasantness/familiarity square:

• pleasantly familiar: choice in grocery stores!
• unpleasantly familiar: terrible-looking asphalt roads.
• unpleasantly unexpected: lack of shade on the University of Utah's wide-open campus. 

Not pictured: the sun beating down relentlessly on every living thing.

But nothing has been so unexpectedly pleasant as the scenery.  Having heard about the Great Salt Lake, I imagined the environment of Salt Lake City to be the geographical equivalent of hard-water stains in the sink.  But it is actually quite beautiful, as I hope this photograph-laden post will convince you.

At a high elevation, there's not much atmosphere protecting you from the sun's rays, so it's easy to burn in the overhead sunlight.  A thin atmosphere also means, however, that it gets quite cool in the morning and evening, so a lot of people at the conference took the opportunity to hike up into the mountains on whose foothills the university rests.  Here's what we saw on one such trip:

From up here you can make out the Great Salt Lake in the distance.

This is the view looking the other way along the mountain ridge.

This past Saturday, several of us rode the earliest possible public transit to get to the Mt. Olympus trail.  The trail is only 3½ miles long, but none of us realized exactly how steep it would be: in fact, Mt. Olympus is the mountain to the left of center in the picture above!  After a few hours, we decided we hadn't brought enough supplies to make it all the way up, so we turned back after taking a group picture at the height we did attain:

The walk back to the bus stop was long and hot in the midday sun, but stopping to rest gave me the chance to photograph this guy, who is about as long as my index finger:

I want to close by showing pictures from two of the local attractions: Red Butte Garden ("Butte" is pronounced like "beauty" without the "-y") and its next-door neighbor, the Natural History Museum of Utah.

Red Butte contains so many different types of gardens, the two times I went I didn't see anything twice.  There's an herb garden, a rose garden, a medicinal garden, a five-senses garden especially for kids... all with signage that succeeds at being simultaneously informative and discreet.  There are places to wander on trails and places to sit under boughs of wisteria.

Some of the plants blew me away with their beauty, like these Blue Glow Globe Thistles:

And these miniature delights of whose name someone will have to remind me:

Then there's the natural history museum: it's located in a really well thought-out space, with interactive exhibits dedicated to the history of the earth (and especially Utah), the flora and fauna that are native to the region, and the indigenous peoples whose culture is still alive today.

But the star exhibit is the collection of dinosaur fossils!  I have never seen so many complete skeletons arranged in such stirring poses.  Some even swayed with the subtle currents in the air.

The fossils suspended in plates of rock are also beautifully arranged:

Several exhibits tried to give you the flavor of what it would be like to participate in an archaeological dig.  Here's a photo of a room where you could try to match cards to the grid squares beneath you, as if mapping an excavation.

I leave to fly back to the Netherlands on Saturday.  I'm so glad to be getting back to the home that I love, but I didn't think there would be so much here to miss too.  Thanks for reading!

Leiden in June: News and Snapshots

This blog post is going to be pictures and short descriptions, because some of you still want to hear how things are and what we've been doing and discovering.

Hofjes

In Leiden there are dozens of tiny garden courtyards that used to be associated with almshouses, but are now simply open to the public. However, they're not particularly well publicized, and I had never been inside of more than one or two of them until this Spring when I went with a friend on a self-guided tour, and found the doors to the secret gardens everywhere.

This isn't even the prettiest one.

Waterlilies

In June it gets warm enough that some canals turn green with algee, and some are covered with lilypads.

I like to think the ducks enjoy the lilypads

Butterfly installation

We had been wanting to do some sort of origami installation for a long time, but this May before my parents came to visit we put it together. You can see it here in the dark, as it took us a long time to put it up, but the night is a rare sight these days. This far north in June the sun doesn't set until well after 10, and it stays light a good while after. We have hardly used our bike lights in ages, and sometimes we still wake up confused very early in the morning, because at 4 am it is already light again. It reminds me of nothing so much as a chorale we sang in college choir which ended with a triumphant phrase about heaven: "and there we shall walk in endless light."

They're made from tracing paper

Neighborhood Party

Our neighborhood had a party this weekend, complete with a band, lots of free food, information about a community garden starting up, a place to sign up for helping out elderly neighbors (which we successfully negotiated in Dutch!) and arts and crafts. There were photographs of our park from previous decades, and prints of paintings from before then all on display. There was even an association handing out beautiful gift bags of looseleaf tea to everyone from the neighborhood. Often at festivals I get a little overwhelmed by the crowd and the noise, but this was nothing like a typical festival. We bumped into our Dutch teacher, our friends from church, and walked around with them, and painted some mugs, we felt like this is our home. The girl singing and playing guitar was doing a lovely cover of "fix you" by Coldplay, and we walked around the park, happy and content.

We painted these mugs!

Teaching violin--sometimes in Dutch!

On a more practical side, I'm now registered with a music lesson association and have found several more students, many of which I am teaching almost entirely in Dutch. The children have very understanding parents, and they help me translate when I need help with a few words, but for the most part it's been going really well.

I have no pictures of my violin students but here is our orchid!

Knitting

Because so many of our good friends are having babies (last count it was more than 30 friends in the last two years), Owen and I have decided that knitting some baby hats is an order, and have gone on a trip to the yarn shop accordingly. It's really nice to be knitting again, as both Owen and I had taken a bit of a break, and find that we've missed it.

Let there be baby hats!

Summer plans

This Summer Owen will spend four weeks in Utah at the 2015 Summer Institute on Algebraic Geometry, and I'll be traveling around Europe for some of that time, visiting friends in London and Paris, and having friends visit me as well. It will be an exciting time.

The park near our flat

Plans for the Future

Some of you have asked what we've decided about staying in the Netherlands, and here is our answer for now. We're staying one more year, so we plan on leaving in August 2016, which is three years total. That means this year I'll be applying to PhD programs, and Owen will be looking for jobs, and we'll do what we can to land ourselves in a place that's reasonable for both of us, and hopefully not so far away from family.

Here we are, married for two years already!

That's the news from Leiden.